Taube
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| Editor(s) | Jens Gerber, Marina Rüdiger, Laurens Schlicht |
| Author(s) | Marina Rüdiger, Laurens Schlicht |
| Design | the studio sunshine, Frankfurt am Main |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Size | 20 x 26 cm |
| Pages | 52 |
| Illustrations | 27 |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-056-9 |
Human, City, Pigeon
Public perceptions of the pigeon have shifted drastically over the past centuries. In the 1700s, it was welcomed as a guest who commanded humans’ unfailing solicitude; today, by contrast, it is often perceived as a nuisance. It has become an animal that defaces squares and buildings. Why does the pigeon in the settings of our daily lives prompt feelings of loathing and fascination, but also indifference? Jens Gerber’s photographs undertake an expedition into the city of the pigeons. Rounded out by essays by Marina Rüdiger and Laurens Schlicht, the book illuminates the subject of the city pigeon from the perspectives of photography, science, and literature, and explores the question of how pigeons shape the built environment and how the latter informs their behavior in turn.
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CLARA MOSCH
and early art events in the GDRRead moreThe legendary producer-run gallery Clara Mosch and the artists’ group of the same title that gathered around it were founded in Karl-Marx-Stadt (today’s Chemnitz) in 1977 and existed until 1982. The catchy name was an acronym of the contributors’ last names: CLA = Carlfriedrich Claus, RA = Thomas Ranft and Dagmar Ranft-Schinke, MO = Michael Morgner, SCH = Gregor-Torsten Schade. As the founders of the first producers’ gallery in the GDR and creators of diverse oeuvres, the group’s artists rank among the foremost exponents of avant-garde art in East Germany. The book presents works of art, limited editions, and posters as well as photographs from the Ralf-Rainer Wasse archive in the collections of the Lindenau-Museum in Altenburg. One thematic focus is on Clara Mosch’s land-art happenings and plein-air pieces. The unconventional actions attest to the group’s stated objective of building greater awareness of the ongoing devastation of the local environment. Forty years after the fact, Clara Mosch’s work has lost none of its relevance and urgency.
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FINALE
DIRECTOR’S CUT25€ Add to cartThe Best Part …
In 1994, Britta Erika Buhlmann took the helm at Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, from which she will retire in the spring of 2022. In her twenty-eight-year tenure, she has enlarged the museum’s art collection and put her personal stamp on it. The classical modernism division was strengthened with the addition of major works by Otto Dix, Hermann Scherrer, and Karl Buchheister, while key pieces by François Morellet, Martin Willing, Werner Pokorny, and others have enriched the museum’s holdings in sculpture. A newly established division of the collection is dedicated to the creations of American artists such as Eric Levin, Kiki Smith, Charles Pollock, and Richard Pousette-Dart. More than a few artists—the list includes Carmen Herrera, Pierrette Bloch, Eva Jospin, and Nobuyuki Tanaka—made their German or even European début at the mpk.
In this book, members of the mpk’s staff offer their takes on selected works in the collection, unfurling a subjective story of their engagement with works that have earned the museum its reputation as a “place of discoveries.”
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Franziska Opel
Close and Cold32€ Add to cartWith sex toys, the potential for misinterpretation and ill-advised use is vast, as countless slapstick comedies illustrate. Steering clear of quick laughs, Franziska Opel deftly harnesses this anarchic power of misunderstanding to explode our perceptions and worldview. Her works are painstakingly planned experimental arrangements in which she modifies or deforms mundane objects as well as those sex toys in subtle ways or powers them up in series, making us see them with fresh eyes. They cast a spell over us with their sensual allure, while our associative circuits processing what we see spark a certain sense of irritation. Curiosity, attraction, bewilderment, shame—expertly staged in photographs for this catalogue, the works elicit a wide range of emotions. Their energizing contradictions are elaborated by contributions from gifted writers: standalone poetic-narrative writings that reflect on several key aspects of Opel’s art in offhanded yet challenging ways.
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MK Kaehne
Π = 3,1415935€ Add to cartThe biography of conceptual artist MK Kaehne (b. Vilnius, 1963; lives and works in Berlin) oscillates between Vilnius, Moscow and Berlin. Influenced by Russian Constructivism, he draws and builds suitcase sculptures with a department store aesthetic, a reversal of the readymade principle. His focus gradually shifted from the formal to the psychological, towards life-size figures such as It’s me (2023): a hyper-realistic replica of himself, lying upside down in the mud, with a garden gnome next to him. Kaehne’s work is strictly analytical, but the results are full of tragedy and irony. Unintentional drawings, in which biographical, Dadaist and political elements merge, accompany his oeuvre. A total work of art that traces personal and social development.
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America! America!
How real is real?38€ Add to cartMyths, Projections, Aspirations
In times of fake news and alternative facts it is becoming even more clear how the American Dream is closely interwoven with emotional pictures and symbols. At the same time, it can be said that no other nation might have the same strong awareness of the power of images. Images of the American Way of Life, which are produced in media and entertainment, are able to consolidate existing power structures and perceptions of reality, but also question them in a radical way. The psychologically charged canvasses of Eric Fischl, the hermetic scenes of Alex Katz, the enormous film-noir-like graffiti paintings of Robert Longo dissect the dreams and fears of an insecure white middle class. Simultaneously, artists such as Jeff Wall or Cindy Sherman conquer scenes that critically reflect our media-influenced perception, becoming models for subsequent generations. By showing 70 masterpieces of US-contemporary art, the book shows how artists from the 1960s to date comment on the American reality.
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Sevina Tzanou
10€ Add to cartSevina Tzanou’s (b. Athens, 1994; lives and works in Bonn and Athens) large-format paintings show ecstatic bodies on the verge of abstraction that refuse to submit to categorization, cooptation, or control. They arise from the affect-laden situations the artist sets out to render in her paintings. She begins by priming the canvas with a monochrome coat of paint, on which she then sets down informal, expressive gestures, sometimes working with a mop or so-called “octopus brushes” that recall BDSM whips. The bodies depicted in the works are Tzanou’s painterly response to the abstract forms accreted on the canvas. Everything about her art is performative, the painterly process no less than the creation of bodies, gender, and sexual identity. Her subjects are drawn from ancient myths and motifs in the history of painting as well as contemporary debates.
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René Holm
Let me be your everlasting light25€ Add to cartLight is the theme of the new paintings by René Holm (b. Esbjerg, 1967). Faceless protagonists traversing symbolic forests with leafless trees occurred already in previous works, stripping them of individual or local signifiers and moving them into a spiritual and universal realm. Skulls with burning candles in Still lifes symbolize the fragility of life and unavoidability of death. Holm goes a step further and makes his figures carry the symbols in their hands or even has them become themselves live “still lifes” with burning candles on their backs. The presence of death is not a picture to behold from afar but a truth to be aware of and carry with us every day. The burning candles also mean that we’re here with our sorrow as well as our light. We must burn to shine. This book accompanies the artist’s gallery exhibition Let me be your everlasting light in Horsens, Denmark.
- Release September 2025
The Magnificent Seven+
Strong Contemporary Female Artists44€ Add to cartWhen The Magnificent Seven hit the silver screen in 1960, heroism was firmly men’s business. Now it is women artists who are redefining the art world with visionary energy. Sebastian C. Strenger portrays outstanding women making art today, including Ingeborg Lüscher, Elfie Semotan, Xenia Hausner, Valérie Favre, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, and Cristina Lucas. Their works question power structures, play with identity, or deconstruct prevailing narratives. Their art is figurative or abstract, narrative or conceptual, political or introspective. These women are changing the art market and dominate the new canon at international institutions by calling existing structures in question and opening up spaces for fresh thinking.
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Ugo Rondinone
winter, spring, summer, fall20€ Add to cartUgo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) is one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. For three decades, the conceptual and installation artist has built an oeuvre grappling with themes of time and impermanence, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture. Spanning diverse media—painting, sculpture, film, and installation art—his work is rooted in the transformation of outward reality into a subjective and emotionally charged world within, harnessing a multifaceted system of inspirations and references from German Romanticism to American Land Art and international pop culture. Balancing the mundane with the spiritual, the artist conjures suggestive atmospheres that capture the contemporary mood.
This book gathers four exhibitions of Ugo Rondinone’s work in 2021: a wall . a door . a tree . a lightbulb . winter at theSørlandets Kunstmuseum (SKMU), Kristiansand, Norway; a sky . a sea . distant mountains . horses . spring at Sadie Coles hq, London; a rainbow . a nude . bright light . summer at Kamel Mennour, Paris; and a low sun . golden mountains . fall at Galerie Krobath, Vienna.
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João Onofre
Untitled (in awe of)25€ Add to cartJoão Onofre’s works are tributes to art history and pop. He gleans what is in danger of being lost right now, realigns it, and translates it into something sublime. His art encourages the beholders to reconsider a past that has faded in collective memory with a critical eye and make peace with it. His creative process is guided by the material and a clearly defined concept that nonetheless does not restrict a work’s finding its own way. That is why he does not commit to a particular medium, making videos, performances, installations, and much more. What all his works have in common is that they probe the limitations of their medium and our perceptive capacities in novel ways. This catalogue presents three recent works in which the essence of Onofre’s art becomes manifest: he molds myths and symbols into awe-inspiring images, sounds, and forms—not for nothing have critics labeled him an alchemist. In the catalogue, his tangible compressions of cultural history are rendered in imposing pictures and flanked by an ambitious essay that places them in their context.
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Africa
in the View of the Photographers19,90€ Add to cartContemporary Photography from Africa
Stereotypes still dominate the Western image of Africa; we tend to know little about cities like Lagos, Porto-Novo, or Kinshasa. The book presents photographs by African artists who tell stories from everyday life in the metropolises, of the unruliness of nature and industry, of traces of the past and pop culture. Osborne Macharia, for example, interweaves Kenya’s cultural identity with fictional Afro-futuristic plots; Yoriyas documents the small moments of life in his native Casablanca in pictures that have been picked up by the New York Times, National Geographic, and Vogue; Alice Mann’s intimate essays in portraiture, meanwhile, explore ideas about the making of pictures as a collaborative act. With additional works by Ilan Godfrey, Fabrice Monteiro, Kibuuka Mukisa Oscar, Léonard Pongo, and Fethi Sahraoui, the book offers a profoundly original survey of African realities.
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Tobias Pils
Drawings55€ Add to cartDrawings is the first book dedicated exclusively to the painter Tobias Pils’s (b. Linz, 1971; lives and works in Vienna) drawings. His graphical forms—the lines, figurations, even the intervening spaces—constantly change the direction in which they set out. Their ambivalence destabilizes any attempt at interpretation. One would think that the indeterminacy of Pils’s visual idiom must torment him, yet in fact this state of existential tension fills him with absurd pleasure. Rather than conceiving his works with a clear objective in mind, he allows himself to fall into them. He—his art—remains open to everything that happens in the creative process. Taken together, Pils’s drawings operate along the diffuse boundary between order and disorder, as though, acknowledging the disordered present (the life we lead), they came from an ordered past (the life we have constructed for ourselves).
Tobias Pils studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1990 until 1994. His works have been displayed in museums around the world, including at the mumok, Vienna (2021); the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020); the Musée Picasso, Paris (2020); the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2020); Le Consortium, Dijon (2018); the Aspen Art Museum (2018); the Chinati Foundation’s John Chamberlain Building, Marfa (2016); and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010). In 2020, he executed a large wall painting at the École normale supérieure in Paris-Saclay.
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Stephan Kaluza
Die dritte Natur14€ Add to cartThe Nature of Art as Totality and Idyll
The philosophy of nature is central to the artist Stephan Kaluza’s (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) work. As he sees it, there exists a succession of different natures: first nature is Kaluza’s designation for a world as immediately felt by (early) humans, part of an encompassing and close-range experiential totality they labeled ‘nature’ and perceived as a physical, but also spiritual and emotional concatenation of events. Second nature is stripped down to an objective and utilitarian quality; nature becomes a resource, the basis of life, the environment. In a kind of linguistic turn, speech mediates a surrogate, an alternative world, that positions nature as culture’s opposite; the former becomes replaceable in favor of latter. Yet this culture is far from devoid of yearnings for the immediacy that it has lost, and so develops an ‘artificial idyllic nature’ in turn. This third nature of the arts—a purely human nature—harks back to the archetypes of a first nature in escapism and totalized immersion.
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Matthias Dornfeld
danke esslingen42€ Add to cartAt first glance, the paintings of Matthias Dornfeld might strike us as naïve or even primitive. However, his still lifes, flower and animal depictions, and abstracted portraits occur in a compelling discourse with the avant-garde of European art history. Yet the works are equally accessible without that background, namely with their playful and provocative gestures, which tend to push the depictions to the brink of possibilities. After a comprehensive retrospective in the Villa Merkel Esslingen, this book documents the show and includes texts by Friedrich Meschede, Daniela Stöppel, and Christian Gögger. The in-depth essays illuminate Dornfeld’s oeuvre and iconography and furthermore discuss the unconventional hanging of the show as well as its reception.
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Horst Schwitzki (1932–2016)
Eine Werkmonografie38€ Add to cart“I have my place in concrete painting!”
Horst Schwitzki’s (b. Marburg/Lahn, 1932; d. Frankfurt/Main, 2016) talent was recognized early on by renowned painters including Arnold Bode and Fritz Winter. During his studies at the Werkakademie, today’s Kunsthochschule, in Kassel, Schwitzki came into contact with concrete art. The network he built there opened doors for him, leading to exhibitions with prestigious galleries such as Rolf Ricke’s and Rudolf Zwirner’s. By the 1970s, however, he found himself compelled to make a living by working first as a graphic artist for an advertising agency and then as a construction draftsman. Although these day jobs left him little time for painting, he kept working on his art until 2010. This book is the first to present a comprehensive survey of Schwitzki’s oeuvre, which spans almost six decades and shows him continually devising novel creative solutions within the formal repertoire of concretion. The biography, rounded out by statements from contemporaries, colleagues, and friends, offers profound insights into the highs and lows of an artist’s life that stands as a characteristic example of the experiences of the generation born in the 1930s.
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Peter Zimmermann
abstractness26€ Add to cartTreading the Limits of Originality
Peter Zimmermann (b. 1956, Freiburg; lives and works in Cologne) is one of the most important conceptual media artists. With his work, he consistently experiments with visual reproduction techniques and gained international recognition in the late 1980s with his Book Cover Paintings: motifs from book covers such as that of the Diercke Weltatlas or the Polyglott travel guides, which Zimmermann transfers to the canvas with oil and epoxy resins. The relationship between original and copy is the central theme of his work, with which he addresses the ambivalence of artistic and digital authorship. This monograph brings together early works and a selection of current productions.
Peter Zimmermann studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart and was professor at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne, from 2002 to 2007.
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MEUSER
Werke 2012–2023 (GERMAN)48€ Add to cartEver since his studies with Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich, since his first exhibitions – for instance at ‘Kippenberger’s Office’ in 1979 – Meuser (b. Essen 1947, lives and works in Karlsruhe) has been a solitaire. His sculptures are unyielding and unruly, just as much as they are vulnerable and tender. They are witty and heart-touchingly charming.
Meuser finds his material in the scrapyard. Confidently and empathically, he reinstates form and dignity to the remnants and vestiges of industrial society. As a romantic, he grants things a life of their own and turns them into self-reliant protagonists, once more. Unwaveringly, he works to re-poetize a standardized and maltreated world.
The lavishly designed monograph is published on the occasion of Meuser’s 75th birthday, presenting works and exhibitions from the past ten years. Eight international authors and scholars create a dazzling mosaic and reveal how Meuser boldly holds his own in face of Duchamp, Minimalism, and Social Sculpture. An open-ended outlook.
Meuser studied 1968–1976 at Art Academy, Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich. 1991 he received the ars viva award. 1992-2015 professorship at Academy of Fine Art, Karlsruhe.
Since 1976, numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions and works in international collections: Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; documenta IX / Fridericianum, Kassel; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Joanneum, Graz; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul; Städtische Galerie, Karlsruhe; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe.
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10 Jahre Württembergische Volksbühne
Reprint der Festschrift von 192915€ Add to cartCentennial Publication of the Württembergische Landesbühne Esslingen
In 2019, the Württembergische Landesbühne Esslingen (WLB)—one of the oldest regional theatres in Germany—is celebrating its 100th anniversary. On the occasion of this anniversary, the tenth commemorative publication by the Württembergische Volksbühne from 1929 is being reprinted. The unique document of the time visualizes in a special way the important role that the topics of cultural education and culture in rural areas, which are still relevant today, played in the young Weimar Republic immediately after the First World War. The brochure also documents both the mission and the daily work of the theater. In addition, the reprint is complemented by an essay from Joachim J. Halbekann, the principal of municipal archive of Esslingen, providing—for the first time in the history of the WLB—a comprehensive historical essay that examines the time betweeen 1919 and 1933/34.
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Thyra Schmidt
Über Diebe und die Liebe. On Thieves and Love.15€ Add to cartAn artist’s book, an artist’s text
On twenty-two large-format typographic sheets, Thyra Schmidt (b. 1974, Pinneberg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) develops a narrative featuring moments in an amorous relationship. Thoughts and encounters between “her” and “him” are captured in poetically constructed, fragmentary units of meaning. Imaginary images are conjured in the mind’s eye: Close-ups and intimate insights into a delicate web of interpersonal incidents. Personal observations and experiences form the starting point of this artistic exploration of love. Yet the focus of her work is not on autobiographical rendering, but rather on the tracking down of elementary structures, a general understanding of intimacy.
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Clemens Krauss
Antidot | Gegengift40€ Add to cartClemens Krauss restlessly shuttles across history; his vehicles are painting, video art, sculpture, and performance. Yet Krauss is not “just” an artist, he is also a psychoanalyst and physician. As such, he has first-hand experience of time as the defining factor of existence, daring him to play with it. The bosom of painting is where he feels safest after his hazardous excursions back into his youth and forward into death. Executed in thick paints, his work is physical, material, which is also to say, it exists in time: everything passes away, even the picture. Evanescent, more than anything, are encounters of the sort Krauss stages as part of his psychoanalytical practice; all that remains is the indelible impression they leave. To be indelible, to recall the past, while also “letting happen what has never happened,” as he puts it, these are the ambitions he pursues in his art. Preserved between the covers of the present catalogue and reproduced in thousands of copies, his works now fan out in an instant to circulate for an indeterminate period of time among countless hands, whence they will effortlessly penetrate the barriers of our inner lives to bring us one step closer to transcendence.
